2nd Hard Drive Not Recognised

[TBH1]

System - Athlon 600mhz, 384mb RAM, w98se

Had to re-install w98se on my system last week and now my 2nd hard drive is not recognised - - -

BIOS knows its there, fdisk knows its there, a utility called testdisk 4 knows its there and can actually see the stuff I have on there. I have changed cable 3 times, checked and double checked jumpers, fixings - - - still no luck.

Any ideas please ??

[mark2]

Have you set it to Autodetect in the Bios ?

[madboy33]

whats the jumpers set to on 2nd HDD?

[Guest ellas]

have you tried the add hardware wizard in system properties,hardware.

[Agent Smith]

Hello TBH1 and wellcome to the forum.

First quick thing to try, assuming all your jumper settings are correct (I assume you had both drives fitted ok prior to re-install and have not changed anything), go into device manager and manually set the assigned drive letter for all other drives (cd, dvd etc.) other than your c drive to the end of the alaphabet ie. x y z.

Restart the pc and see if your second hard disc appears, if so you can then set the other drives back to a suitable letter. If you need to know how to change the drive letters please post back.

Have you installed the correct and latest chipset drivers?

If still no joy, then I would suggest changing the cd drive letters as above, then in device manager remove anything listed under "hard disc controllers". When you reboot, it will redetect and reinstall the drivers for your controllers, hopefully finding your second drive.

Finally, if no joy with the above, please post back with some more info ie. are drives set as primary master/slave, or primary and secondary master etc.

Good luck. Mr. Mouse.

[TBH1]

thanks to you all for responding -

autodetect is on in BIOS

jumpers on 2nnd hd set to slave - - as stated, this setup had worked before re-installation

tried to add manually - - nothing found

the setup is C drive primary /master

D drive ( the missing one ) Primary / slave

DVD Rom secondary / master

CDRW secondary / slave

In device manager both discs appear as generic ide disk type 47

current drive letter assignment of C for first one, this area greyed out for the D drive. I don't know how to rename devices - - -

Gonna try removing the hard disk controllers now - - - -

[TBH1]

removed controller as suggested, no luck - - - -for some reason I was real confident that that was the answer. Tried removing the 2nd drive too, the one without a drive letter - - - came back after reboot but again, no luck.

Nobbin off to bed right now - - - Im sure someone here is gonna sort this out by the morning :P - - - must be someone on the night shift :lol:

[Agent Smith]

Hi again TBH1, like you I'm off to bed as well, but I will give this some more thought as I sleep.

In the meantime, to change the drive letters for your other drives, go into device manager and in the cd roms area, select each device (one at a time) and click on properties. Under the settings tab, you will have an option to select a start and finish drive letter for the device. Simply set these to the same letter for each drive, ie. start and finish =z for the cd and start and finish =y for the dvd. The reason I suggest this, is just in case the assigned letter for one of these drives is clashing with the assignment for your second hard disc.

Also, you don't say why you had to reinstal windows, is it possible the drive has become corrupted?

I am assuming you have some data on the drive you wish to keep. If so is there enough room on the first disc for the data? It may be worth booting in to dos, and using xcopy to transfer the data to your primary drive, then after verifying this is all ok, fdisking the second drive and appling a fresh format.

As I say, I will give this some more thought, and post back tomorrow, unless someone else comes up with a solution tonight.

G'nite. Mr. M.

[TBH1]

Mr. Invincible Mouse - - -ain't you up yet ??????

My original problem - - - ain't sure if I can point to another forum here but just in case I can't : - ( have cut, pasted and edited this)

I was getting the error : - DISC WRITE ERROR unable to write to disc in drive c: data or files may be lost press any key to continue

sometimes system recovered after pressing a key, and sometimes need to reboot - - - but either way the system then appears OK for a day or two. Had run scandisk, both windows and Norton version and no problems found.

The disc is an IBM/Hitachi 60gb jobby and is maybe 3 months old.

The consensus of opinion in that one was maybe over-heating - - -it had been extraordinarily hot - and problems seemed to go when the cooler weather got here; this was only a couple of weeks ago by the way. This problem was on my C drive; my D drive, up to then was fine - - -so I backed up all important stuff to the D drive ( sounds almost comical now dunnit ??? ) ready to re-install w98se onto the C drive.

This is where my real problem began ie can't access my secondary drive, the drive with all my back-ups on !!! As you can see my original problems were with the drive which is OK now - - - and no configurations have been changed, just the fresh install of w98se.

Sorry if I have 'gone on' a bit here.

[Guest ellas]

bit reading here http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_...Q_20635713.html had another link but it wont work.

[TBH1]

ellas - - thanks for this though spookily enough its almost the exact opposite to the problem I have - - - - everything appears to see this drive except w98se.

Don't get me wrong, good reading all the same - - - - - and a good forum which I'll have to bookmark.

[Agent Smith]

Hi again TBH1, sorry I'm at work otherwise I would have posted earlier.

Can you see the second drive and it's contents if you boot the machine into dos?

Also how did you "back up" your data? A long shot here, but you havn't used any disc compression software on that drive have you?

Finally for now, have you tried disconnecting your cd and dvd drives, and plugging the drive in as a secondary master (you will need to change the jumper on the drive to do this).

As you can guess, at the moment I think the primary task is to get to read and recover your data, we can worry about system configurations later.

Mr. M.

[TBH1]

Mr M - - -at work eh ??? No excuse :)

Booting to DOS - - - must confess I have only booted into there via w98 boot disc - - though when I boot via Hitachi Drive Fitness test thingy, that finds the drive.

The back-ups on this 'missing' disc were done by windows backup - - but ain't too worried about them, its the manual backups I've done (drag and drop type of thing), my kids folders, scanned photos, mp3's - - - the list goes on.

As I've mentioned , its not the 'work of a moment' to swap CD drives around with it, need to take out all drives and re-arrange, though temperary. Will have a go tonight when I'm at home - - -will get a night off the thing one of these days !!!

I'm with you mate - - the primary task right now is to recover the data from this drive - - - but would still like to 'crack' the main event.

One more thing, I don't think I've mentioned here - - - - - -before this event, my BIOS had some kind of password on it, probably set by me ages ago but long forgotten. I took this opportunity ( while I had the case off checking for over-heated discs) to reset CMOS - -therefore BIOS back to defaults. So, the only TWO things different now to when things were working are : -

1. Re installation of w98se

2. BIOS reset

Was gonna say I hope that hasn't made a difference in your thinking - - - but thinking of that I hope it has - - - -confused ??? :blink:

[monkeyhanger]

TBH1

Hi.

Resetting the bios to defaults should not be a problem. The on chip primary and secondary IDE's must be enabled, otherwise the main hard drive and the cdrom, dvd would not show up.

Your slave hard drive is set as primary slave in the bios and set to auto? You could try setting it to manual, save settings and exit.

As Mr. Mouse says if you disconnect every thing on your secondary IDE cable, ie cdrom & dvd. just ease the IDE cable out of the devices. This will disable them. Take the IDE cable out of the slave hard drive and plug one of the connectors you have taken out of either the cdrom or dvd. You will not have to move any jumpers on the hard drive.

Boot up to windows and see if it is recognized. Check POST as it boots.

[monkeyhanger]

Oh. forgot to add.

Have you checked the back of the drive to see if all the pins are aligned. Seeing that you have tried different cables, the pins can be bent quite easily.

[TBH1]

Monkeyhanger - -thanks for your input mate - - - checked pins last night, probaly the night before and the night before that - - - am losing track methinks !! Can I presume that I can use the secondary / slave connection without having anything plugged into the secondary / master ??? If so, it would mean I ain't gorra dismantle after all. Another presumption, if I use the primary/master, surely I would need to change jumper settings ??? Though am bowing to your better judgement here - - -

[Agent Smith]

Hi TBH1, I've just had a look on the other forum at your original problem.Click Here (PCA Thread) I have to say, I disagree with the general consensus of opinion. With the information you have posted there, I do not think you have an overheating drive.

I would be very inclined to say at this point, that you have a duff drive. As the drive is only a few months old, and your data is currently on another disc (albeit slightly inaccessible at the moment), I would investigate the possibility of having it replaced before you go any further.

If you desperatly need your data, it should be possible to attach your second drive to another machine as a slave, in order to get to your data. This would also go some way to ruling out any faults with this drive.

The only other thing I can think of at the moment, is that I have rarely seen read/write issues to hard drives caused by faulty memory. I uploaded a small memory testing program on an earlier thread click here the instructions are on that thread as well. It may be worth running this just to be on the safe side.

Regards. Mr. M.

[Agent Smith]

I still stand by my last comments, but one other last ditch thing to try, is to mark the second hard drive as a removable device (under the settings tab for the drive) in device manager. This has the effect of creating a new media id on the drive, which may then allow it to become usable.

Mr.M.

[monkeyhanger]

TBH1

Yes you presume correctly. ;) but you do not have to change the jumper settings for the primary master ( your C drive)

If you take out the connectors from your cdrom and dvd ( these will be secondary master and secondary slave). You can then plug one of these connectors in to the slave hard drive. It then does not matter if the drive is jumpered for master or slave. This way you don't have to change any jumpers on any of your drives.

With no cdrom or dvd connected.

You should get Primary master- detected

primary slave - none

secondary master-none

secondary slave- detected.

Hope I ain't treading on your toes Mr. Mouse. The idea of putting the slave in another computer to salvage the data is a good one.

[Agent Smith]

Don't worry about my toes Monkey. In fact the more input the better. As you can see from TBH1's post in PCA, someone made a suggestion about overheating, and all of a sudden there was a whole rush of people suggesting fitting extra fans. I think woodchip has the correct answer, but it seemed to go overlooked.

The moral of this story, is no matter how good you think the person giving the advice is, it always helps to add another option, even if it seems silly :lol:

Mr. M.

[TBH1]

I thought all along the drive (the 60gb C drive) seemed suspect but the shop i got it from insisted they had my whole PC in for test for a day or two !!!! I'm sure all they would have done is install windows over the top, as I have done, and turned round and said there was begger all wrong with it. I did do Drive Fitness test on it whch through up no errors, spoke to Hitachi about it and said if test shoed no errors, then no errors existed - - - -

Will modify to 'removable when I get home - - -which won't be long.

[Agent Smith]

If your controller is failing, you would not nessecarily get any disc errors as the actual platters would not have any faults. The way to test a failing controller, is to use a piece of software which writes a large amount of data to the disc, then does a thorough verification of said data, and repeats this several times.

If you need to return the pc to the shop to test the drive, then I would remove your old disc first, just to be on the safe side.

Mr. M.

[TBH1]

just got the memory tester thingy - - -will try it when I get home, which is almost iminently - - - -catch you later.

[TBH1]

Have tried setting rogue drive to 'removable' - - but said it needed formatting - - - -

Gonna go in there right now - - -well, after BB that is ( sad bastard I know - - -woops, can I say that - - sad ????).

Gonna wop secondary / slave onto this begger - - - - -feel it in me water, we're gonna crack this. :D

[monkeyhanger]

Mr. Invincible Mouse

I would agree that woody's suggestion is worth a try. ;)

What is perplexing me is that it is recognised in device manager, as well as the bios.

The thread on pca does indeed jump on the temp bandwagon and snow ball from there.

There could be 101 reasons why the slave drive is not been seen in windows, a bad mbr, boot sector virus, a dodgy ide cable or controller, an irq conflict, wrong setting in the bios, dodgy drive, cable wrong way around, windows playing funny bu**ers. The list is endless.

Also your comment on pca, TBH1. You say that even system restore will not work, yet you say your o\s is 98. <_<

Hope the machine is still booting and you are having a few to wind down. ;)